The Ghost Road

‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘I just wanted to go to sleep, and this bastard was stopping me.’

  ‘How long had you been in the line?’

  ‘Twelve days.’ Wansbeck shook his head. ‘Not good enough.’

  ‘What isn’t good enough?’

  ‘That. As an excuse.’

  ‘Reasons aren’t excuses.’

  ‘No?’

  Rivers was thinking deeply. ‘What do you think I can do to help?’

  ‘Nothing. With respect.’

  ‘Oh, damn that.’

  Wansbeck smiled. ‘As you say.’ He held his handkerchief to his mouth as another fit of coughing seized him. ‘I’ll try not to give you this at least.’

  Wansbeck was a man of exceptionally good physique, tall, broad-shouldered, deep-chested. Rivers, estimating height, weight, muscular tone, noting the tremor of the huge hands, a slight twitch of the left eyelid, was aware, at a different level, of the pathos of a strong body broken – though he didn’t know why the word ‘broken’ should occur to him, since, objectively speaking, Wansbeck’s physical suffering amounted to nothing more than a bad cold. He’d made a good recovery from his wound.

  ‘When did you first notice the smell?’

  ‘In the hospital. Look, everybody goes on about the smell. I know there isn’t one.’ A faint smile. ‘It’s just I can still smell it.’

  ‘When was the first time?’

  ‘I was in a side ward. Three beds. One man quite bad, he’d got a piece of shrapnel stuck in his back. He was called Jessop, not that it matters. The other was a slight arm wound, and he was obviously getting better and I realized there was a chance I’d be left alone with Jessop. The one who couldn’t move. And I started to worry about it, because he was helpless and I knew if I wanted to kill him I could.’

  ‘Did you dislike him at all? Jessop.’

  ‘Not in the least. No.’

  ‘So it was just the fact that he was helpless?’

  Wansbeck thought a moment. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Were you left alone with him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What happened?’

  A sound midway between a snort and a laugh. ‘It was a long night.’

  ‘Did you want to kill him?’

  ‘Yes –’

  ‘No, think. Did you want to kill him or were you afraid of wanting to kill him?’

  Silence. ‘I don’t know. What difference does it make?’

  ‘Enormous.’

  ‘Afraid. I think. After that I asked if I could go on to the main ward. And to answer your question, the first time I noticed the smell was the following morning.’ A long silence, during which he started to speak several times before eventually saying, ‘You know when I told the doctor about not wanting to be left alone with Jessop, he said, “How long have you suffered from homosexual impulses?”’ A quick, casual glance, but Wansbeck couldn’t disguise his anger. ‘I didn’t want to to to fuck him, I wanted to kill him.’

  ‘Does it still bother you to be alone with people?’

  Wansbeck glanced round the room. ‘I avoid it when I can.’

  They exchanged smiles. Wansbeck put his hand up and stroked his neck.

  ‘Is your throat bothering you?’

  ‘Bit sore.’

  Rivers went round the desk and felt his glands. Wansbeck stared past him with a strained look. Evidently the smell was particularly bad. ‘Yes, they are a bit swollen.’ He touched Wansbeck’s forehead, then checked his pulse. ‘I think you’d be better off in bed.’

  Wansbeck nodded. ‘You know, I can tell the smell isn’t real, because I can still smell it. I’m too bunged up to smell anything else.’

  Rivers smiled. He was starting to like Wansbeck. ‘Tell Sister Roberts I’ve told you to go to bed, and would she take your temperature, please. I’ll be up to see you later.’

  At the door Wansbeck turned. ‘Thank you for what you didn’t say.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘“It was only a boche – if it was up to me I’d give you a medal. Nobody’s going to hang you for it.”’

  ‘You mean other people have said that?’

  ‘Oh, yes. It never seems to occur to them that punishment might be a relief.’

  Rivers looked hard at him. ‘Self-administered?’

  ‘No.’

  A fractional hesitation?

  ‘Go to bed,’ Rivers said. ‘I’ll be up in a minute.’

  After Wansbeck had gone, Rivers went to close the window, and stood for a moment watching boys playing in the square. High sharp cries, like seagulls.

  ‘Are w-we a m-m-m-m-mistake? W-why are w-we?’

  ‘Of course you’re not a mistake,’ his mother had said, smoothing the hair back from his forehead.

  ‘So w-why d-d-does h-he s-say w-w-w-w-we are?’

  ‘I expect he just likes girls more than boys.’

  ‘B-b-b-b-but w-w-why d-d-does he?’

  Rivers smiled. I know, he thought, I know. Questions, questions.

  ‘Boys are rough and noisy. And they fight.’

  ‘B-b-but you h-h-have to to to f-f-f-ight, s-s-sometimes.’

  Yes.

  Three

  Prior dawdled along, scuffing the sleeve of his tunic along the sea-wall, looking out over the pale, level, filthy sands to where the waves turned. Silence was a relief after the jabber of tongues in the mess: who was going out with the next draft, who was up for promotion, who had been recommended for an MC. The eyes that slid to your chest and then to your left sleeve. The cards, the gossip, the triviality, the muckraking, the rubbish – he’d be glad to be shot of it all.

  He was going back to France. He’d spent the evening writing to people: Sarah, his mother, Charles Manning, Rivers. And the last letter had reminded him of Craiglockhart, so that now he drifted along, remembering the light flashing on Rivers’s glasses, and the everlasting pok-pok from the tennis courts that somehow wove itself into the pattern of their speech and silence, as Rivers extracted his memories of France from him, one by one, like a dentist pulling teeth.

  He wondered what Rivers would think of his going back. Not much.

  The beach was dark below him. They were all gone, the munitions workers and their girls, the war profiteers with stubby fingers turning the pages of John Bull. German boats came in close sometimes. ‘Not close enough,’ Owen had said, as they’d waited for the draft list to go up on the wall. And he’d laughed, with that slightly alarmed look he sometimes had.

  A friendly, lolling, dog-on-its-back sort of sea. You could swim in that and not feel cold. He started to wander along with no idea of where his feet were taking him or why. After a few minutes he rounded the headland and looked along the half-circle of South Bay at the opposite cliffs, surmounted by their white Georgian terraces. Some of his brother officers were up there now, living it up at the most expensive of the town’s oyster bars. He’d been there himself two nights ago, but tonight he didn’t fancy it.

  Closer at hand were souvenir shops, coconut-shies, swing-boats, funny hats, the crack of rifle fire, screams of terror from the haunted house where cardboard skeletons leapt out of the cupboards with green electric light bulbs flashing in the sockets of their skulls. If they’d seen … Oh, leave it, leave it.

  Behind him, along the road that led to the barracks, were prim boarding-houses with thick lace curtains that screened out the vulgarity of day-trippers. You couldn’t go for a walk anywhere in Scarborough without seeing the English class system laid out before you in all its full, intricate horror.

  He heard a gasp of pain beside him, and a hand clutched his sleeve. A red-haired woman, flashily dressed and alone. ‘Sorry, love, it’s these shoes.’ She smiled brightly at him. ‘I keep going over on the heel.’

  She rested her arms beside his on the railings, her right elbow lightly touching his sleeve.

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Why, you been offered summat?’

  She muttered on. It had come to summat if a decent
woman couldn’t have a rest without being … pestered. And who did he think he was anyway? Couple of bits of gold braid, they think their shit smells of violets –

  ‘I don’t pay.’

  A whoop of laughter. ‘Well, you’re certainly not getting it free.’

  He smiled, allowing a note of pathos to creep into his voice. ‘I’m going back to France next week.’

  ‘Aw, piss off.’

  For a moment he hoped she might take her own advice, but she didn’t. They stood side by side, almost touching, but he was miles away, remembering Lizzie MacDowell and the first day of the war. ‘Long Liz’ they called her, for, among the girls who worked Commercial Road, most of them reared in the workhouse, Lizzie’s height – a full five feet no less – made her a giant. She was his best friend’s mother, a fact not at the forefront of his mind when he met her in a back alley on his way home from the pub and told her he’d enlisted.

  – Good lad! she’d said.

  Lizzie was a great enthusiast for the Empire. And somehow or other he’d gone home with her, stumbling up the passage and into the back bedroom, until finally, in a film of cooling sweat, they’d lain together on the sagging bed, while the bedbugs feasted and a smell of urine rose from the chamberpot underneath. She’d told him about her regulars. One man came every month, turned a chair upside-down and shoved each one of the four legs in turn up his arse. Didn’t want her to do anything, she said. Just watch.

  – Well, you know what a worry-guts I am. I keep thinking what’ll I do if he gets stuck?

  – Saw the bloody leg off.

  – Do you mind, that’s the only decent chair I’ve got.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Just thinking about an old friend.’

  Money had not changed hands on that occasion. He’d been Lizzie’s patriotic gesture: one of seven. Poor Lizzie, she’d been very disillusioned when five of the seven turned out not to have enlisted at all.

  ‘Do you fancy a bit of company, then?’

  He looked at her. ‘You don’t give up, do you?’ And then suddenly the shrieks, the rattle of rifle fire, pub doors belching smells of warm beer were intolerable. Anything not to have to go on being the oil bead on this filthy water. ‘All right.’

  She was telling the truth about her shoes. If she hadn’t clung to his arm she’d have fallen over more than once as they climbed the steep steps to the quieter streets behind the foreshore.

  ‘What do they call you?’ she asked, breathing port into his face.

  ‘Billy. You?’

  ‘Elinor.’

  I’ll bet, he thought. ‘D’ y’ get “Nellie”?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ she said, her voice pinched with dignity. ‘It’s just round the corner here.’ Perhaps she sensed he was having second thoughts for her arm tightened. ‘’S not far.’

  They went up a flight of steps to the door. As she fumbled with the key he looked round, and almost stumbled over a cluster of unwashed milk bottles, furred green.

  ‘Mind,’ she said. ‘You’ll have everybody out.’

  The hall dark, smelling of drains and mice. A face – no more than a slit of sallow skin and one eye – peered through a crack in the door on his left.

  ‘You’ll have to be quiet,’ Nellie whispered, and then, catching sight of the face just as the door closed, yelled, ‘There’s some right nosy bastards round here.’

  They walked up the stairs, arms round each other’s waists, shoulders and hips bumping in the narrow space, catching the breath of each other’s laughter, until her tipsiness communicated itself to him and all doubt and reluctance dissolved away.

  She unlocked the door. A naked overhead bulb revealed a tousled bed, a chair piled high with camisoles and stays, a wash-stand and – surprisingly businesslike, this – a clean towel and a bar of yellow soap.

  ‘You won’t mind having a little wash.’

  He didn’t mind. He was buggered if he’d rely on it, though.

  ‘Do you know,’ she said, unbuttoning her blouse, ‘I had one poor lad the other week washed his hands?’

  Prior tugged at his tie, looking around for somewhere to put his clothes, and noticed a chair by the fireplace. Rather a grand fireplace, with a garland of flowers and fruit carved into the mantel, but boarded up now, of course, and a gas fire set into it. He was pulling his half-unbuttoned tunic over his head when he noticed a smell of gas. Faint but unmistakable. Tented in dark khaki, he fought back the rush of panic, sweat streaming down his sides, not the gradual sweat of exercise but a sudden drench, rank, slippery, hot, then immediately cold. He freed himself from the tunic and went to open the window, looking out over sharp-angled, moonlit roofs to the sea. He told himself there was no reason to be afraid, but he was afraid. All the usual reactions: dry mouth, wet armpits, skipping heart, the bulge in the throat that makes you cough. Tight scrotum, shrivelled cock. Jesus Christ, he was going to have to put a johnny on that, talk about a kid in its father’s overcoat. He heard his own voice, awkward, sounding younger than he felt. ‘I’m afraid this isn’t going to work.’

  ‘Aw, don’t say that, love, it’ll be al –’

  Phoney warmth. She was used to pumping up limp pricks.

  ‘No, it won’t.’

  He came back into the room and looked at her. Her hair had fallen across her shoulders, not in a cloudy mass but in distinct coils, precise crescents, like you see on the floor of a barber’s shop. He picked up one of the coils and wound it round his fingers. Red stripes marked the places where the bones of her stays bit into the skin. Catching the direction of his glance, she rubbed ineffectually at them. He wasn’t behaving as clients generally behaved, and any departure from the usual run of things made her nervous. Two people’s fear in the room now. But her gaze remained steady, surprisingly steady, when you thought that only five minutes ago she’d been too tipsy to walk straight. Now… well, she’d had a few, but she certainly wasn’t drunk. Perhaps she needed the mask of drunkenness more than she needed drink.

  ‘Have I got a spot on the end of me conk or what?’

  ‘No,’ he said stupidly.

  They stared at each other.

  ‘Wouldn’t hurt to lie down,’ she said.

  He finished undressing, reached out and tentatively took the weight of her breasts in his hands. So far, he realized, he hadn’t had the shopping list, the awful litany that started whenever you met a woman’s eyes in Covent Garden or the Strand. ‘… and five bob extra to suck me tits.’

  ‘Two quid,’ she said, reading his thoughts. ‘On the table there.’

  He got into bed, telling himself the cold damp patch under his left buttock was imagination. He put his hand down. It wasn’t. Dotted here and there on the sheet were tiny coils of pubic hair. He wondered whose spunk he was lying in, whether he knew him, how carefully she’d washed afterwards. He groped around in his mind for the appropriate feeling of disgust, and found excitement instead, no, more than that, the sober certainty of power.

  All the men who’d passed through, through Scarborough, through her, on their way to the Front … And how many of them dead? As she squatted over the bowl to wash – a token affair, he was glad to see – he felt them gathering in the hall, thronging the narrow stair, pressing against the door. Halted on the threshold only by the glare of light.

  ‘Can we have that out?’ he said. ‘It’s in my eyes.’

  And now they were free to enter. Waiting, though, till the springs creaked and sagged beneath her weight. His hands were their hands, their famished eyes were his. Pupils strained wide in starlight fastened on a creamy belly and a smudge of dark hair. He stroked and murmured and her fingers closed round him. ‘There you are, you see. I told you it’d be all right.’

  He fucked her slowly. After a while her hands came round and grasped his arse, nails digging in, though whether this was a pretence to hurry things along or a genuine flicker of response he couldn’t tell. He was aware of their weight on him, his arms were braced to carry it …

>   And then something went wrong. He looked down at the shuttered face and recognized the look, recognized it not with his eyes but with the muscles of his own face, for he too had lain like this, waiting for it to be over. A full year of fucking, before he managed to come, on the narrow monastic bed, a crucifix above it, on the far wall – he would never forget it – a picture of St Lawrence roasting on his grid. The first time Father Mackenzie knelt, holding him round the waist, crying, We really touched bottom that time, didn’t we? One way of putting it, but we? What the fuck did he mean by we? Later – though not much later, he’d been a forward child – he’d begun to charge, not so much resorting to prostitution as inventing it, for he knew of nobody else who got money that way. First Father Mackenzie. Then others.

  The only way not to be her was to hate her. Narrowing his eyes, he blurred her features, ran them together into the face they pinned to the revolver targets. A snarling, baby-eating boche. But they didn’t want that, the men who used his eyes and hands as theirs. He felt them withdraw, like a wave falling back.

  All right, then, for me. He lowered his forehead on to hers, knowing without having to be told that she wouldn’t let him kiss her. She wriggled beneath him, and he lifted his weight. Slowly and deliberately, she put her index finger deep into her mouth, and brought it out with a startling pop, and then – he had time to guess what she intended – scratched the small of his back delicately so that he shivered and thrust deeper, and rammed the finger hard up his arse. Ah, he cried, more with shock than pleasure, but already he was bursting, spilling, falling towards her, gasping for breath, laughing, gasping again, tears stinging his eyes as he rolled off her and lay still. Hoist on his own petard. That had always been one of his tricks to speed the unreasonably lingering guest.

  She got up immediately and squatted over the bowl. He took the hint and started to dress, sniffing round the fireplace as he buttoned his tunic.

  ‘What’s the marra with you?’

  ‘I thought I could smell gas.’

  ‘Oh that, yeh, you probably can. Tap leaks. I’m tired of telling her.’

  He wouldn’t do this again, he decided, buckling his belt. It might work for some men, but … not for him. For him, it was all slip and slither, running across shingle. He hadn’t been sure at the end who was fucking who. Even the excitement he’d felt at the idea of sliding in on another man’s spunk was ambiguous, to say the least. Not that he minded ambiguity – he couldn’t have lived at all if he’d minded that – but this was the kind of ambiguity people hide behind. And he was too proud to hide.